NEWS RELEASE

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Iranian Film 'The Day I Became a Woman'
To Screen at UW-Eau Claire 

MAILED: Feb. 28, 2002

         EAU CLAIRE — "The Day I Became a Woman" (Iran 2000), a film that the Village Voice called "a highly economical allegory on three stages of Iranian female existence," will screen March 7-10 at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
         The International Film Society will present the film by first-time director Marzieh Meshkini at 6 and 8:30 p.m. Thursday through Sunday in Davies Theatre.
         The first episode, "Havva" ("Eve"), tells of a girl's last happy hour of childhood on the day she turns nine years old and must assume the responsibilities of a woman. In the existential second episode, "Ahoo" ("Gazelle"), a young married woman competing in a bicycle race is chased by her husband and in-laws on horseback. In the third sequence, "Houra" ("Black-Eyed Beauty"), an old woman enlists local boys to take her on a spending spree to buy every modern appliance she has been denied in her life.
         "The key word is 'inescapable,'" wrote New York Times film critic Stephen Holden. "The movie's three vignettes are all meditations on the near-impossibility of escaping the assigned female role in a fundamentalist Muslim state.
         "'The Day I Became a Woman' is an astonishing directorial debut because it doesn't include a single loose end or extraneous image," Holden continued. "The movie is enigmatic in the way of many Iranian films for leaving characters' backgrounds and motives unexplored. But its indifference to the tyrannical psychological realism that determines the shape and content of most Western films feels liberating."
         In Farsi, subtitled in English, the 78-minute color film is not rated.
         Tickets are $2 for International Film Society members and UW-Eau Claire faculty/staff, and $1 for UW-Eau Claire students, at the University Service Center, (715) 836-3727.
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JS/NW

  News Bureau
Judy Berthiaume
UW-Eau Claire News Bureau
Schofield 201
(715) 836-4741
newsbur@uwec.edu

Updated: Feb. 28, 2002